A life's love shattered

Charles LerouxTribune senior writer

(From police and court records)

On the morning of Saturday, Dec. 2, 1995, Chicago Police Officer Robert Hanrahan was dispatched by radio at about 7:50 a.m. to the alley behind 1830 W. Newport Ave., on the North Side of the city. He arrived at 7:53, and there he found the body of a man bleeding profusely from the head. It was a cold day, and the man's head was "steaming" where he had sweated.

Officer Hanrahan took the man's wallet from his right, rear pocket and learned that the victim was 58-year-old Ervin Shorter, a laborer for the Department of Streets and Sanitation who worked from 10 in the evening to six in the morning. The name was broadcast over the air to other officers in the area. He had been killed by two gunshots to the head -- one to the right temple and one that entered the corner of his right eye.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"For the funeral," Linda Shorter said, "they put a veil over the casket. He had been shot here" -- she put one finger to her face below her right eye, next to her nose -- "but that just looked like a mole or something. It was the other damage they didn't want people to see.

"He had three nice suits, one for going to church, one for going to funerals and one for going out. I put him in the funeral suit. He liked earth tones, and this one was a tan color. I would shop for his clothes, and he would always like what I picked out. The only thing he wouldn't let me get for him was his Stacy Adams shoes. He always got high tops, and always black, always black."

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(From police and court records)

On the morning of Dec. 2, 1995, at about 7:40 a.m., Ms. Judith Dean was in her car, driving west on Roscoe toward the intersection of Roscoe and Ashland. She stopped at a red light at that intersection. She was in the right hand lane. Ahead of her, in the left lane, there was a "grayish, dirty car," and directly in front of her, a "light green shiny car." There were two people in [the green] car, both young African-American males. The passenger wore a bulky coat and a knit hat. The driver also had a bulky coat on and wore a very short hair cut.

As she sat waiting for the light to turn, she saw four fingers coming out from under the lid of the trunk of the car ahead of her. The lid of the trunk was closed, but she could see the fingers "just above the knuckle sticking out at an angle, kind of wiggling back and forth." The skin color was black, and it appeared to be the hand of a male.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"It was kind of romantic, the way we met," Mrs. Shorter recalled. "It was in the early '60s at a dance hall at 74th and Cottage [Grove], and we caught each other's eye across the room. I sent my girlfriend to ask his name. He came over and asked me to dance, and we danced the night away. At the end of the evening, we exchanged numbers. We dated a good six months and got more and more serious. We got married at City Hall, no big thing.

"First, we were in a three-room apartment. Then we moved to Parkway Gardens at 63rd and King. Some years later, we moved into our home in the Marquette Park/Englewood neighborhood. It's coming up on 30 years in that house.

"We bought it 'as is' and had to fix it up. The decor was not to our liking. There was red, flocked wallpaper in the living room and dining room, and there were red velvet drapes. It took forever to get that wallpaper off, but then we made it nice. I don't want to make it sound like more than it was. It was just home."

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(From police and court records)

Ms. Dean looked at the driver of the car next to hers and made the motion of using a telephone with her hands, asking if he had a phone. He shrugged his shoulders. Looking to the car ahead of her again, she saw the driver looking in his rearview mirror. ... When the light turned green, the green car continued west on Roscoe. Ms. Dean turned onto Ashland. She stopped at a gas station at Addison and Ashland and dialed 911.

On the TV news that night, she saw the story of the murder of Mr. Shorter, and she again called police. She was asked to come to the station at Belmont and Western and was taken to the garage. She identified the car she had seen with the hand sticking out of the trunk. The car she identified was a green, 1995 Chevy Impala SS that belonged to Mr. Ervin Shorter.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"We had a '76 Cutlass Oldsmobile we bought new. It took us where we wanted to go, but it finally broke down in 1988. We went for two years without a car. I hated asking people for rides to the store, so we got a Ford Escort. That made it to 1995 even though it was a lemon. It seemed it was in the shop every other month.

"There was this car at the Haggerty dealership at 67th and Western that Ervin kept looking at. He liked that it was heavy, like older cars he had had. It was a special model of Impala made in only a few years. This was a '95 and had a Corvette engine. He was thinking about retiring in the next few years, and I think he wanted to get something nice for himself, something that would be paid off when he retired.

"I never liked the Impala. It was too powerful. It would go from zero to 60 in, I don't know, but BOOM and it was GONE! I couldn't drive it. I tried and put it up on the curb. He bought it in February, and he was like a kid with a new toy.

"He said he'd remodel our kitchen. The kitchen had metal cabinets that must have been there from when the house was built in 1926. But I made it work. I could cook in that kitchen. I made the things he liked, beans and oxtails and short ribs. The day it was finished, he surprised me. Not that I didn't know about it, but I hadn't seen it all done. When I got home from work, he said, 'This is your kitchen. That's my car.'

"It was too much of an attention getter. We'd stop for gas, and young punks would come look it over. That made me nervous. He'd say, 'I worked hard for this car.' He'd say, 'I saved for this car.' He wasn't going to not drive it."

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(From police and court records)

In his statement, defendant [Richard Morris] indicated that he was 22 years old and was married to Lyda Antia, 23. They lived in Kenosha, Wis. On Dec. 2, 1995, defendant, Antia and defendant's friends, Tywon Knight and "Taz" [Bryan Hoover], drove from Kenosha to Chicago in Knight's gray Buick Park Avenue. As they were driving, defendant, Hoover and Knight discussed robbing a bank.

They got off [the Dan Ryan] Expressway onto Garfield [Boulevard] and saw Ervin Shorter's car at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. [It was] suggested that the car's owner could be a highly paid drug dealer and would be easier to rob than a bank. Hoover got out of the car and pointed his gun in the driver's side window of Shorter's car. Shorter moved over, so Hoover went over to the passenger's side and got in while Knight got into the driver's side. Hoover asked Shorter to give him the "dope" and the money. Shorter replied that he did not have any money or dope.

They drove in two cars into an alley where they forced the owner of the Impala into the trunk of his car. They drove back onto the [Dan Ryan] Expressway and headed west on [Interstate Highway] 290 until they got off on Ashland Avenue. Defendant told the others that he was looking for a "place to do" the owner of the Impala, meaning a place to kill him. They pulled into an alley and stopped. Defendant determined that this is where they would shoot the victim. Defendant got the victim out of the trunk. Defendant had the .357 pistol out. Knight stood next to him.

Richard Morris states that he orders the owner of the car to his knees. Richard Morris states the owner of the car starts begging for his life. Richard Morris states that he had the gun pointed at the owner, and the owner had his arms shielding his face. Richard Morris states that the owner of the car landed on the ground trying to shield his head. Richard Morris states he aimed at the owner while he laid on the ground begging for his life and shot him twice.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"I believe that Ervin must have tried to reason with those boys. I'd get to running my mouth about some of the boys on our block, and he would always say I was too critical about them. He said I should try to find some good in them. They looked up to him, called him 'Pops.' It's ironic that young black boys would be the ones to take his life.

"In the trial, they asked Morris why he had shot him, and he said it was because Ervin had seen his face. That was no reason. Ervin might have just let the car go and not even identified those boys. He was like that. Morris said that my husband cooperated and didn't struggle with him. They asked him if they still thought he was a drug dealer when they saw him, and Morris said he saw he was just 'an old grandpa.'"

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(From police and court records)

At about 7:45 [a.m.], Officer Stephen Lotts and his partner, Officer Michael Lopresti, were driving south on Paulina, headed toward Belmont Avenue. They were just finishing their 12-to-8 a.m. shift. They were in uniform. Directly in front of them was a 1995 Chevy Impala SS. It was very clean and shiny. It appeared "brand new." This car stopped at 3250 N. Paulina. Two men got out of the car. At [the first] trial, Officer Lotts identified defendant Richard Morris as the driver and co-defendant Tywon Knight as the passenger. The two walked across the street, crossing in front of the police car "so close they could have almost touched it."

They made eye contact with the officers and, in the words of Officer Lotts, "They gave us a look that I have never seen before -- one of surprise and shock and fear." They reached the curb at the mouth of an alley, and there they began to run eastbound into the alley. Officer Lotts yelled at them to stop then ran back to the police car, where Officer Lopresti had gone. Officer Lotts radioed a report of the chase.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"I wasn't feeling well [the day before the murder], so we stopped at a Long John Silver's at Archer and Western and got food to take home. We ate at the kitchen table, and he asked me, 'You all right?'

"Later that night, when it was time for him to get ready for work, he put his work clothes on. He dressed real warm because he'd be outside. He'd put on two or three pair of socks, some long johns, a long-sleeve undershirt, corduroy pants, a plaid shirt, steel-toed boots. He had a zip-up orange suit he'd put on over that plus a skull cap and earmuffs.

"With all that on, he'd be almost too stiff to bend over and kiss me goodbye. I'd usually walk him to the door, but I wasn't well, so I stayed where I was. Later, my neighbor said she saw him sit in the car a long time before he drove off. Was he thinking about not going because I was sick? I just don't know.

"The phone woke me up around nine the next morning. I was the only one at home. It was his supervisor at work. 'Is Shorter there?' he asked. That's what they called him, 'Shorter.' I said no. Sometimes, instead of getting home around seven or so, he would have breakfast with his cousin, so I didn't think much about it.

"Then I got another call. 'This is Detective Ryan from homicide,' he said, and then he said something about a carjacking. I thought, 'Oh no, he's stranded somewhere without the car.' And then I thought, 'Homicide?' Did Ervin kill somebody over that car?' The detective put my son [who was an adult then] on the phone, and he kept being evasive. 'Hi, Ma,' he said, and I said, 'Where's Ervin?' and he said, 'Hi, Ma.' He put Ryan back on. He said, 'Mrs. Shorter, we were going to send an officer to your house to tell you this, but since your son is here, I'll tell you now. Your husband is deceased.'

"I was so worried when I turned 48. Everybody in the family seemed to die at 48. My brother was 48 when he died. My sister was 48 when she passed. When I was 48, I didn't die. My husband died."

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(From police and court records)

As Officers Lotts and Lopresti drove west on Henderson Street, they saw a white male individual, Mr. Charles Leroux, pointing south, and they saw defendant Knight running into the gangway between two buildings. They chased him into the gangway and, when he fell, they tackled him. They saw defendant Morris run out from behind some garbage cans. They eventually found defendant [Morris] in a garage, hiding under some debris. Along the chase route, they found a chrome-plated, fully loaded revolver, a set of keys for Mr. Shorter's car and a .357 magnum revolver.

Other officers arrived and took defendants to the 19th District Station at Belmont and Western. Officer Lots then returned to the car [the defendants] had parked on Paulina. He ran the license plate number and was told it was registered to Mr. Ervin Shorter. When the officers opened the trunk of the car they found a number of tools -- screwdrivers and wrenches and the like -- and found also that the inside metal and rubber of the trunk had been damaged.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"He kept so much junk in his car, boots and rain gear -- well, he needed those because he worked outdoors -- and tools and things. I think that was why he couldn't get the trunk lid open after they put him in there, because he didn't have room to move. I can close my eyes and see him curled up in a fetus position. I have a '95 Cavalier. I keep that trunk empty.

"I got rid of the Impala, didn't want to see it again. After he died, the family each grieved in our own way. Ervin had a daughter from a previous marriage. She was older. My daughter had her husband and their daughter for support. I sort of went into my own world. Later, a woman from the state's victim and witness program counseled me.

"My son took it real hard. He was the one who went to the alley and saw the blood. He was the one who had to go to the morgue to identify the body. He had never seen his father naked, and he was surprised that Ervin was so muscular. Well, he lifted those heavy cans all day. The medical report called him a 'healthy, well-nourished, black male.' When I heard that, I thought of the pressure cooker we got from Sears so he could make himself some food before I got home. He'd make pinto beans, and I'd do corn bread the night before. Sure, he was well-nourished."

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(From police and court records)

Testimony from the 1998 trial.

Q: Mrs. Shorter, you are the wife of the deceased in this case, Mr. Ervin Shorter?

A: Yes, I am. Well, I was.

Q: And, Mrs. Shorter, did you have any children with Mr. Shorter?

A: Yes, I have two.

Q: Do you have any grandchildren?

A: One. [Mrs. Shorter's daughter had another child after the first trial in 1998. Ervin Shorter's daughter from a previous marriage had three children.]

Q: Mrs. Shorter, I am going to show you what I have marked as People's Exhibit No. 140 for identification, which is a two-page document. I ask you to take a look at that document, ma'am, and tell me if you recognize it?

A: Yes, I do.

Q: What do you recognize that to be?

A: My impact statement.

Q: Now, Mrs. Shorter, at this time I would ask you to read People's Exhibit No. 140 to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

A: Dear Judge Toomin. There is an emptiness in my heart as a part of me is missing. Some days, I go into deep depression when I think of the vicious way in which my husband Ervin Shorter's life was taken. But then I start to remember the man I loved and married almost 30 years ago. A man who loved his family and home. A man who worked hard each and every day of his life, an honest man who believed that you gave a day's work for a day's pay. A man who I could always depend on.

We shared everything. I am a stronger woman today because I had a strong man in my life. We sort of lived up to our wedding vows to love, honor, cherish and respect each other through sickness and health, for better or worse and until death do us part.

With the help of God, family and friends I am trying to move on. But my life will never be the same. My only hope now is that justice will be done concerning the people responsible for the death of my husband.

I am sorry. I'm nervous. Could I repeat that please?

THE COURT: Sure.

My only hope now is that justice will be done concerning the people responsible for my husband's murder.

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(Linda Shorter's reflections)

"After the trial, Tywon Knight walked over to me and said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't pull the trigger, but I was there, and I'm sorry.' His family was in court, his grandmother, his mother and three sisters. The grandmother said to me, 'Forgive our boy. We spoiled him. Pray for us.' I didn't know what to say. Richard Morris didn't say anything. He did a pimp walk out of the room.

"I keep asking myself how I can forgive him. Well, I'm working on it.

"I gave Ervin's clothes to charity though I still have some pants and sweaters that I mean to donate. I just don't ever seem to get to it though. I'm so blessed that I was able to stay in our home. He had made provisions for that. He's supporting me even in death. Our little block has mostly the same people with some of a new generation. Neighbors send kids to mow my lawn. It's a well kept, quiet block. At night I'll look out and it's so peaceful. I got a serious sickness in 2002. I was so wrapped up in grief and depression I wasn't taking care of myself. After that, I took off my wedding ring. I had to let him go.

"He never put me behind him, and I never tried to go in front. We walked side by side."

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After the chase, a widow's grief

-- By Charles Leroux, Tribune senior writer

Last September, I was subpoenaed to appear in Cook County Circuit Court to testify in the retrial of a murder suspect. My role was anything but dramatic. In December of 1995, I had pointed out to police officers in a passing patrol car the direction the suspect and an accomplice had gone as they darted between my house and the one next door.

This had put police back on the suspects' trail at a time when the officers had momentarily lost them. During the trial, I often was introduced to others involved in the case as "The Pointing Guy."

In the course of the second trial, I got a chance to speak with Linda Shorter, the wife of the murder victim, 58-year-old Ervin Shorter, and was taken by the affecting way she talked about their life together and how the smooth fabric of routine suddenly could be torn to shreds. I also was struck by the fact that, although she hated having to relive the nightmare each time, she showed up at every hearing, no matter how minor, during the last decade.

"I had to see it through," she told me.

The Shorters were working people. In his job with the Department of Streets and Sanitation, Ervin lifted cans of garbage. After his murder, Linda's job became watching the slow grind of justice to be sure the system did not neglect her husband.

Ervin Shorter's murder was one of 824 in Chicago in 1995. In the play "Death of a Salesman," Linda Loman notes the despair and financial ruin weighing upon her husband. "Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper," she says. "But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."

Linda Shorter might well have made such a speech.

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Justice meted out for killers, accomplice

-- By Charles Leroux, Tribune senior writer

(From police and court records)

Richard Morris was sentenced to death at the end of his first trial. He also was sentenced to consecutive terms for vehicular hijacking and aggravated kidnapping. In 2003, his death sentence was commuted to life without the possibility of parole when then-Gov. George Ryan granted blanket commutations to all of the state's Death Row inmates just before leaving office.

Morris' second trial, which was prompted by an appeal filed before the commutation, ended in a sentence of 105 years: 60 years for murder, 30 years for aggravated hijacking with a weapon and 15 years for aggravated kidnapping with the infliction of harm. He is serving his sentence at the Stateville Correctional Center. At the moment, the Department of Corrections calculates that he could be eligible for parole in 2048. He'd be 75.

In a separate trial, Tywon Knight was sentenced to 145 years: 100 years for murder plus the same 30- and 15-year terms as Morris for the other two charges. He is serving his time at the Tamms Correctional Center. He would be eligible for parole in 2046. He'd be 72.

According to court testimony, Morris explained that he needed to rob a bank for money for hiding out because of a "problem in Kenosha": his role in the murder of a fellow drug dealer, Fred Jones, in Morris' apartment the night before Ervin Shorter was killed. Morris was upset that Jones had sold him some bad cocaine. He held Jones in a bear hug while an acquaintance, Bryan Hoover, beat Jones with a four-iron golf club. Morris then strangled Jones with a towel. Morris and Hoover tied the body up with television cable and put it in the trunk of a car they borrowed from Tywon Knight. Morris, his wife and Hoover drove the car to Chicago, stopping to buy lighter fluid along the way with money taken from Jones' pocket. They dumped the body in an alley at 1331 S. Kedvale Ave. in the early morning hours of Dec. 1, 1995, doused it with lighter fluid and set it on fire. The three then got back into the car, drove back to Kenosha, picked up Knight and returned to Chicago, where they kidnapped Shorter.

In Kenosha County Court, Hoover was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide in Jones' murder and for conspiring to hide a corpse. He is serving the sentence at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.

Lyda Antia, Morris' wife and a native of Colombia, was sentenced in Kenosha County Court to 6 years for mutilating the corpse of Fred Jones. She was sentenced to 15 years in Cook County Court for aggravated vehicular hijacking. In 2006, she was deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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ABOUT THE STORY

Tribune senior writer Charles Leroux (left) was called as a witness against the man who shot Ervin Shorter.

In the above story, the crime's details come from police reports and court documents.

The quotes come from Leroux's interviews with Shorter's widow, Linda, who waited 11 years for justice.

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IN THE WEB EDITION

The Tribune's Charles Leroux describes how he came to be a witness in a murder case at chicagotribune.com/truecrime.